Canada Day 2021

Today is Canada Day 2021. The first day of July. Remembering the signing of the articles of confederation 155 years ago. Often called “Canada’s birthday”.

This year Canada Day is more sober than joyful. Discoveries of more than a thousand unmarked graves at former residential schools in Saskatchewan and British Columbia make for a difficult celebration. I have a calendar of African Proverbs. The proverb for July 1 reads, “The road to freedom is full of thorns and fire, yet happy is the one who follows it.” Our road to freedom leads through the thorns of fire of the residential schools.

I cannot reflect meaningfully on the history of Canada’s residential schools, still less on the experience of being indigenous to Canada. I am a recent immigrant from the United States of
America, and I do not understand at all fully the experience of having one’s culture and language and family torn out from under one’s feet. I can listen and learn, rather than try to describe.

This brief essay, then, does not probe the Canadian reality more fully. Instead, I dig into my own memories sparked by the descriptions I am hearing.

I was sent to a residential school when I was a boy – in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia and part of the British Empire. I was seven years old when my parents took me from our home in the Matopo Hills to Hillside government hostel in Bulawayo. I lived there for the next 18 months until we moved for a six-month stay to Pennsylvania. On our return to Bulawayo, I moved to a missionary children’s hostel (Youngways) next door to our home. From age 7 to age 15, for nine months of the year I was in the hostel and for three months in my home.

There are fundamental differences between my experience and the residential schools in Canada. Two differences stand out: 1) Our family was fully agreed to the process, and 2) I was allowed to keep my language and identity. Indeed, my memories of the government hostel are generally good, and my memories of Youngways Hostel are even better. Even so, I remember one basic fact that reminds me of the residential schools in Canada.

In 1958, my Uncle and Aunt (Arthur and Arlene Climenhaga) were the head of our mission work in Zimbabwe. They lived about a mile from the school where I was in the government hostel. Soon after being placed in the government hostel, I walked away from school during the day and headed for their house. When I arrived, they took me back to the hostel. No escape that way!

Uncle Arthur may well have understood my feelings. About 40 years before, when my grandparents lived at Matopo in the 1920s, he was sent to school at Milton Junior School in Bulawayo and lived at the school hostel there. He also was homesick, and one day he walked away from the school and headed for Matopo Mission. The trip took him two days, and when he arrived at Matopo, my grandfather took him back to Milton.

I have heard several of our indigenous people in Canada tell their story, and often their stories include running away from the residential schools. Except that they were caught by the RCMP and returned. My parents and grandparents supported the schools we went to. We were willing participants in the process. Even so, young children miss their families, and my Uncle and I both tried to run away and go home. How much worse was it for our First Nations children when it was the state and not their own families who confined them to the residential schools. The description feels more like prison than like school.

Again, there is no real comparison between my experience and the experience of indigenous children in Canada’s residential schools. But there is a small point of contact, a moment in my life in which I can sit and consider that sense of loss I felt, magnified many times over to encompass my whole generation. I can’t wrap my mind around it, but I can live in it for a few moments.

Canada Day 2021. A time to celebrate, and a time to remember – even the thorns and fire that we walk through on our way to freedom.

Postscript: The above does not explore the complex blend of good and evil that  is part of every human institution. That there was good in the residential schools I do not doubt, and that there were good people involved I accept readily. I am noting only the basic loss fundamental to the hostel experience. Even when much more was good -- as in my own experience -- one is taken from one's family, and that hurts. A lot. In the case of Canada, the blend of good and evil is problematic at best, and we must explore the evil fully on the path to national healing.

Colonialism Lives! (Part Four)

Parts one, two, and three preceded this conclusion. Here I bring my thoughts together, and the meaning of the title of the series becomes clear.

Part Four

To summarize my argument so far:

Colonialism in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries included the assumption that the values of the Colonials were absolute, and that all subject peoples could and should be judged by them. We rightly rebelled against such totalitarianism and also rejected the idea of absolute values. [I think that these two steps moved in tandem, but I am not arguing that case here. I welcome the insights of those who can combine the field of social change with the field of philosophy and tell me if I am right or not – and to what extent.]

This relativism works when we apply it to the use of language. We must take the meanings of the speaker and hearer into account in order to communicate successfully. Such relativism does not work when we apply it to values, because we tend to elevate our own values to an absolute standard for all people. This is the movement that I have been describing with the image of leaving by the front door and re-entering by the back door. [I did not make the case for this elevation, except by implying it in the example of “Baby, it’s cold outside”.]

The song banned by the CBC serves as a case study of this failure. At one level, it is a simple miscommunication. It is caused by hearing the lyrics as if they were written in 2018, with the meanings that would apply had it been written today. At one level, it is as trivial as someone imposing the meaning of homosexuality on someone 100 years ago referring to a gay time. If all that happened was that people misunderstood the song, I would not have written this column. It is the further colonial move of imposing our values that leads to these reflections.

The odd thing is that postmodernism seeks to set us free from such impositions of one group's values on another group, but it has actually served to force the values of the politically strongest group on the whole of society. Colonialism returns under the guise of doing away with colonialism.

I will not analyze this problem further here, but rather I make a few suggestions of what I would like to see (whether or not it ever happens).

1. I believe in absolute values. I suggest that the best way to establish what they are is to look for the values that cultures and religions in general have accepted. [What C.S. Lewis called the Tao, in his essay The Abolition of Man.] TheJosephson Institute of Ethics has worked at this kind of project for many years now.

2. Such a project will not validate any one culture. Our own society’s conviction that individual rights trump all other rights will not make the cut. A society such as China’s conviction that the right of the collective trumps individual rights will not make the cut. The bedrock shared values of societies in general – what we can call the Dao (to use a modern form of Tao) – is more basic than the specific forms people use to construct their own societies. [I add here that my own understanding of these absolute values relies also on reading and interpreting the Christian Scriptures. I do not make the search for Dao rely on any one religion, but acknowledge where I stand among the religions of the world.]

3. A general relativism that looks for what things mean in context is generally good. Making absolute values too broad is a quick road to totalitarianism. Chinese collectivism and Canadian individualism can both express the general values of the Dao.

4. When we condemn the words or actions of another person quickly, we are likely to have taken a colonial-imperialistic action. The problem with the conversation around “Baby it’s cold” is not the questions it raises – those questions and concerns lead to interesting and fruitful learning. The problem is rather the way that some people shut down both the song and conversation about the song by appealing to “Me Too” and date rape. Both issues are serious issues, and they deserve better treatment than restricting DJs from playing a 1940s song about sex.

5. Rather than condemning quickly – whether the conversation is about transgender rights, or Me Too, or missionaries in Africa, or Black Lives Matter, or any other of our current issues – our first step should always be to understand. There is a strong likelihood that when we dislike the other person’s statement (and therefore begin to dislike the person as well), we have not yet really understood the other. Miscommunication is amazingly easy, and imposing our values based on that misunderstanding is one way that colonial lives today.

In the above comments, when I refer to “we”, I mean all of us. We – all of us – engage in this kind of behaviour, and the winner gets to be the biggest colonialist. Which means that the winner loses along with all the rest of us.

Colonialism Lives! (Part Three)

Part One recounted my own beginnings in the colonial era and wander into the present). See part one here.

Part Two noted how miscommunication happens between cultures quite regularly. See part two here.

The problem, I argue, is that we carry the necessary relativism that applies to language over into values at the level of our stated philosophy, but then act on the basis of a new absolutism in practice.

Part Three

I have been considering these reflections for many years. A recent controversy sparked me to put these brief reflections in writing.

This past week CBC announced that it would not include “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in its Christmas play list, following the lead of a number of other radio stations. “Baby” is a call and response song, in which the woman sings and the man responds. Here are the lyrics, with man’s voice in parentheses:

I really can’t stay (but baby, it’s cold outside)

I’ve got to go away (but baby, it’s cold outside)

This evening has been (been hoping that you’d drop in)

So very nice (I’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice)

My mother will start to worry (beautiful what’s your hurry?)

My father will be pacing the floor (listen to the fireplace roar)

So really I’d better scurry (beautiful please don’t hurry)

But maybe just a half a drink more (put some records on while I pour)

The neighbors might think (baby, it’s bad out there)

Say what’s in this drink? (no cabs to be had out there)

I wish I knew how (your eyes are like starlight now)

To break this spell (I’ll take your hat, your hair looks swell)

I ought to say, no, no, no sir (mind if I move in closer?)

At least…

Heard today, the lyrics are problematic in several ways. I highlight two:

1) She said “No”. No means No. In the era of “Me too”, the man’s voice is asking for trouble.

2) “What’s in this drink?” sounds creepy in the aftermath of so many date rape situations.

A bit of internet surfing, however, turns up women’s voices, warning us that in banning the song we may have overstepped the bounds of reason. They point out that she appears to have surprised him by dropping in on him in his apartment. They observe that her protests sound a bit like someone covering themselves from “slut shaming”, even as she makes it clear that she is as willing as he is. As one column [not by a woman writer, at least I don't think so] put it, “These legends of song skillfully and melodically wrung such laughs out of the song’s doth-protest-too-much dance of foreplay that it was surely clear even to a 1940s listener that these two characters were about to have a long night of fireplace-hot and — yes! — deeply consensual sex.” (From Variety)

The problematic line “What’s in this drink?” turns out to be a common line people used when getting ready to do something they weren’t supposed to do. (Although I heard another explanation: that women were often served alcohol-free alcohol and might protest at what is left out of the drink.)

Slut-shaming is bad, and I do not advocate consensual sex outside of a lifelong committed relationship. Those values, however, speak against a great deal of popular music, both from the last century and from our own time. Not to mention much-loved madrigal music from Elizabethan England: “Now is the month of maying, when merry lads are playing ….”

Where did the instant condemnation come from, leading CBC to ban the song from its playlist? I suggest that we have fallen into a habit of judging others by our standards – and, fatally, assuming that our standards are absolute. Colonialism and Imperialism redux. We expelled them through the front door, and they have returned through the back.

[To be concluded.]
Part Four brings a preliminary conclusion to these musings.

Indigenous Relations: The Land

A Biblical Perspective on Land

Scriptural perspectives on the land usually have to do with the Land of Promise, Canaan, given to the Children of Israel (Exodus-Deuteronomy; Joshua). The prophets used reminders of the promise of the land as part of their call to faithfulness on the part of God’s People: Jeremiah, for example, makes it clear that the people have used God’s promises in an illegitimate way to allow unfaithfulness and idolatry to flourish. Consider Jeremiah 22, in which the prophet equates the people with the land, while warning them that they will lose the land.

The passage we read from Deuteronomy 26 contains the profound statement: “My father was a wandering Aramean.” The “father” referred to was Jacob, renamed Israel, who went to Egypt during a famine as a small family (Israel and his twelve sons and their families) and came out of Egypt in the Exodus “a great nation, numerous and powerful”. Deeper than their identity as the “people of the land” was their identity as “God’s people”.

This fact helps us to understand the way that the New Testament refers to God’s people, using the idea that we have a Sabbath Rest (Promised Land) beyond the bounds of this world (for example, Hebrews 3 and 4). A post-biblical writer put the basic idea of our citizenship in Heaven eloquently in the Letter to Diognetus (written by Mathetes – “a disciple” – sometime in the second century):

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. … And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. … They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. …

The people’s relationship to the Promised Land is seen clearly in the Jubilee Laws of Leviticus 25. You remember the basic idea of the Jubilee Year: Every 50 years, all land returns to its original owners and all Jewish slaves are set free and return to their families. We can think of it like this using the founding of Steinbach as a model. In 1874 eighteen families laid out their plots to form what is now the city of Steinbach. Their properties were laid out in narrow strips crossing the creek that ran parallel to what is now Main Street. If Steinbachers had practised the Jubilee, in 1924 all properties would have been restored to the original 18 families. The same restoration would have taken place in 1974, and we would be expecting the next Jubilee in 2024.

The Jubilee year, then, teaches us the principle of radical restoration. Wealthy people gave up their excess wealth, and those who had become poor had their lands and their dignity restored. The simple movement of property in the Jubilee may be impractical (we have many more people in Steinbach today than the original 18 families), but the principle of radical restoration remains.

Concealed beneath this clear truth lies another equally powerful truth. Hear verses 23 and 24: “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.”

One reason for the Jubilee Year was that the land (which they appeared to own) was God’s, not theirs. So in verses 14-16 we read: “If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops.”

This understanding is basic to a scriptural understanding of the land. Genesis 1 and 2 makes the human pair God created stewards or caretakers of God’s creation. Creation itself still belongs to God, but we care for it. Psalm 24 rings out clearly: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.” Jesus tells parables about masters who go away and leave their belongings in trust with stewards or caretakers. When the master returns, he demands an accounting for what he has left in trust. When Jesus will return at the end of time, he will also call us to account for what we hold in trust –not just for our deeds, but for the earth itself.

Mennonites and Land

Two weeks ago, Gerald Gerbrandt reminded us of our history. We are a people who have moved many times – in the case of Russian Mennonites, from Holland to Prussia to Russia to Canada and several countries in the Americas. In many of these places we established colonies, implying our ownership of the land around us. Certainly, here in the East Reserve we have taken possession of our homes and farms and fields; we live here and we are at home here.

At the same time, we retain an awareness that we are citizens of Heaven before we are citizens of Canada. Our membership in Mennonite World Conference reminds us that we belong to a great host of people, so that Mathetes (in the Letter to Diognetus) might say of us:

[Mennonites] are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs … yet … [t]hey live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country.

If we take this insight seriously, we do not own the land to which we hold title. It belongs to God. We are stewards, and the title we hold is the title to care for our home and our lands as servants of God.

Indigenous Realities

At this point, we face a problem. You know that our government (and therefore we ourselves) made treaties with the indigenous peoples of Canada (which we have failed to honour). One of the basic aspects of those treaties is the possession of the land.

This piece of land where we worship this morning was a part of Anishinabe territory. On August 3, 1871, the Anishinabe people signed Treaty 1, giving the settlers encroaching on their lands permission to live here. I do not know enough to describe in depth how the Anishinabe understood the treaty, or how the government understood the treaty, but I can see the basic outline of what happened.

Within three years the first Mennonite settlers came to Steinbach and laid out the village according to the line pattern they brought with them from Russia. Others can explain the history that followed with more authority than I can. Rather, I make two basic points.

·         One: The indigenous understanding of the land closely parallels the biblical understanding we noted earlier. They knew that the Creator God owns the land. They knew that they had permission to use the land, but that it was not their possession.

·         Two: We can conclude readily that the indigenous peoples of Canada did not intend to give ownership of the land to the settlers who were moving in, if only because they did not see such ownership as theirs to give. As stewards of the land, they could give visitors permission to use the land – but that is a far cry from simply giving the land itself.

I suspect that the Mennonite land-owners understood little of this indigenous perspective. Once we have title to land, we assume the land is ours. Lois and I have paid properly for our house and property; we see it as our property. Yet, properly understood, God owns our house and the land, and we live here because the Anishinabe people welcomed us and shared the land with us.

What Should We Do?

What should we do with these realities? It does not mean that those of us who come from outside North America should simply leave. Arthur Manuel writes in Unsettling Canada:

When we speak about reclaiming a measure of control over our lands, we obviously do not mean throwing Canadians off it and sending them back to the countries they came from—that is the kind of reduction ad absurdum that some of those who refuse to acknowledge our title try to use against us. We know that for centuries Canadians have been here building their society, which, despite its failings, has become the envy of many in the world. All Canadians have acquired a basic right to be here. … At present, we are asking for the right to protect our Aboriginal title land, to have a say on any development on our lands, and when we find the land can be safely and sustainably developed, to be compensated for the wealth it generates. [End of chapter one.]

Finding a way forward means that we find a path that embraces the rights of Canada’s First Peoples, as well as of those of us who have come to Canada over the last several hundred years. We are here together, and we must live together. I suggest a few basic thoughts as we do so.

1. The earth – Canada – belongs first to God. We do not own anything, even when we hold title to it. “The earth is the Lord’s”, and we are trustees who care for the earth until Jesus returns.

2. Just as God gave the land in the OT to the Children of Israel, God gives a place for all people to live. God gave the land first to the First Nations of Canada. When our Anabaptist ancestors came to Canada, both First Nations and the Canadian government gave them – and therefore also us – a place to live.

3. This means also that we give up what is sometimes called “the doctrine of discovery”. This doctrine is the legal basis that the government of Canada has used to claim sovereignty over the land of Canada. It suggests that much of the land around us was essentially empty when the first Europeans came to Canada, and they simply occupied the land that they found. This is the old idea of “finders keepers, losers weepers”. The fact that we live on Treaty One land is sufficient indication that someone was here, and that the land belonged to them as much as any human beings could be said to own it.

4. In some sense, all of us are settlers – God has given us a place to settle down and live on this earth. Therefore, in an ultimate sense God owns the land on which we live. First Nations in Canada got here first and received land from God. We followed. Therefore, we must live in justice and peace with each other as stewards of the piece of land God gives us.

5. As long as the first inhabitants of this land are dispossessed and struggling, we cannot live at peace in God’s land. When our Indigenous friends tell us of the hardships of life on the reserves, we know that their pain is our pain and their loss is our loss. Our lives are bound together, and we must find a way forward together.

Conclusion

I come back to the Scriptures. In Deuteronomy 26, it is clear that God has given the people all that they need to live well. They were wandering nomads, with no place of their own, and God gave them what they needed. God does the same for us and for Canada’s Indigenous People, and God wants us to participate in bringing into reality the fullness of life God has for all of us.

In Hebrews, it is clear that a Sabbath Rest remains – something beyond this world. We are still wandering nomads, never fully at home here, whether as Mennonites or as Indigenous People. The truth is that we are all Indigenous people – but our true home is in Heaven, and we are all Settlers – in the places here on earth that God has given us. I have no answers as to how we live justly with each other; I can only say here that we do so in relationship with each other.

The promise of the New Jerusalem is not a reason to ignore the struggle for justice here – as though it will all be alright in Heaven, so we can ignore injustice on earth. Rather, the promise of the New Jerusalem lights the fire for us to work for and with each other, because we know that God will prevail, no matter how deep and painful our failures are on earth. We are going to Heaven together, First Nations and later arrivals alike, and we belong together there and here.

Steinbach Mennonite Church, 28 October 2018

Deuteronomy 26: 1 to 11; Hebrews 4: 1 to 11

A Larger Community

So I keep chasing the idea of community. I'm pretty well convinced that the pursuit of individual fulfillment is inimical to community: even while I seek to do that which is fullfilling and significant. I see also a basic problem with the anti-authority binge baby boomers (me!) did so well. (I took a personality test on the Piaget-Kohlberg stuff once: scored as making decisions on principle, rather than legalistically: felt really good about it! Then the test asked one last question, which revealed that at least some of my oh so principled choices were actually just a manifestation of my distrust for authority. Ouch!)

So, along with a life lived protesting government actions and the seemingly arbitrary decisions of church and business authorities (to name only three sources of dissent), I find myself arguing that we need the community that come from patriotism and school spirit and general commitment to the larger group.

Are there any conditions? Should we just commit to the larger group and then look for the utopia to follow? We need at least one larger commitment: to the human family. As a Christian I subsume this commitment within my commitment to God; but speaking in purely human terms, speaking simply as a person regardless of religious commitment, that person who does not have a fundamental commitment to the good of the whole human family is dangerous indeed.

The point is obvious. If allegiance to a school (since I have been writing about school spirit) were to run so unchecked as to take priority over allegiance to our country, we would recognize it as flawed. If in the name of Penn State one were to fight, and even seek to destroy, supporters and alumni of Pitt, the police would step in and the courts would take away one's freedom.

Speaking as a member of the worldwide community, we have come dangerously close as Americans to acting like such deranged Penn State fans, except with bigger weapons. Perhaps that sense of caution that is so typically Canadian is a necessary ingredient for a truly good patriotism to flourish. I love the USA, and I love Canada: but I love both as part of the whole human family. I call my country to account when we step outside the bounds of being good members of the international community because I love my country, and because it is mine.

In short, to realize community at home, within the context of my larger political community, in the country that is mine own, I am a citizen of earth; I am part of the human family. I am also, and even more deeply, a citizen of Heaven, and believe that only as a citizen of heaven can I truly love my country rightly.

What Is Community Anyway?

I said some time back that there is something sacred about community. North American society, both in the USA and in Canada, has been on a long trajectory towards individualism, even at the expense of community. My generation (1960s baby boomers) used to talk about dropping out to find ourselves. as though our identity was floating around the world waiting for us to catch up with it and internalize it. Supreme individualism! As I observed a few posts back, Canada has as its central constitutional document The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, based on the value and rights of the individual almost without regard to the larger community.

That is of course an overstatement: the notwithstanding clause, for example, is a tribute to the desire to strengthen community at the provincial level; continuing conversations about "unique societies", whether in Quebec or in Nunavut, reflect the same desire to preserve community. But the stronger force in our society is the push towards individualism, and that force is destructive of human community unless it flowers within a commitment to the larger whole.

The common saying from southern Africa is: "A person becomes fully human in and through community." At some level we all know the truth here: that we need each other. We know also that people search for community insistently, even as it slips away from us. Whether in church youth groups discovering the value of true community, or in voluntary associations (clubs of different kinds), or in immigrant communities that seek to maintain something of their ethnic identity after moving to Canada -- repeatedly we hold on to each other. As we must.

But figuring out what really makes community is even harder than finding it. Because our communities, even our identity as Canadians, are essentially voluntary, people routinely leave community behind: then we wonder how we lost what we gave up. I'm struggling to figure out what this thing really is. I remember reading Bonhoeffer on community: profound (whatever he said), and hard to penetrate.

I wonder if some sort of real final commitment is necessary: to God (citizens of Heaven), to country ("Breathes there a man with soul so dead ...."), to something or someone big enough to encompass our whole life. I don't know: I think it is, but I don't know. I'm pretty sure that if there's anything less at the centre of our lives, the individual will beat the centre by default.

An Individualistic Socialism?

In a casual conversation about the last post, a friend observed that those countries I identify as highly individualistic are also among the more socialist in the world. Certainly that is true of Canada. Canadians expect more of government than Americans do. As another friend said some years ago, "Americans value life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; Canadians value peace, order and good government." "Good government" sounds like an oxymoron to many Americans, for whom the only good government is less government.

Thus Canadians willingly pay significantly higher taxes than our American cousins -- and expect more from our government, from paying for health care to paying for education.

I thought of this point when I ran across a recent news story, which stated that Manitoba is the most generous of the provinces in terms of charitable giving, but ranks behind 26 other states in the USA. The Fraser institute did the study, and concluded: "Americans gave 1.67 per cent of their aggregate personal income to charity, more than double the 0.72 per cent of the total personal income Canadians donated to charity."

One could conclude that Americans are more generous than Canadians, a view at odds with Canadian self-perception. I suggest that our belief that the government can and should take care of so much (that is: socialism) is at least as important a factor.

In the end these points all revolve around trying to understand ourselves as Canadians. We have embraced the concept of good government, that government has a responsibility to take care of its people. Perhaps a sense of entitlement is one way that this basic socialism coincides with the individualism that is also basic to our society.

Canadians have shown our good qualities in many arenas of our world. But there is a corresponding weakness to our relative courtesy and good neighbourliness (compared to brash Americans). We can be as self-centred as anyone, when we put our minds to it.

I do wonder if we will push back against the forces of radical individualism. We may yet do that. But then we will have to find out what really does bind us together. And in a nation of immigrants, even more intentionally immigrant than the USA, finding common ground is a difficult task.